


A Little Fall of Rain

by supercantaloupe



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series), Fantasy High
Genre: Campaign 01 Season 02: Fantasy High Sophomore Year (Dimension 20), Fantasy High Sophomore Year Spoilers (Dimension 20), Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-19 07:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29747187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supercantaloupe/pseuds/supercantaloupe
Summary: Aelwyn learns a new way to grow.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 58
Collections: Dimension 20 Alphabet 2021





	A Little Fall of Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt, day 6: Flowers.

The window of the wizards’ tower overlooks the backyard of Mordred Manor. 

There’s a small graveyard plot, its grass overgrown. There are a few trees, as old and strange and history-filled as the rest of the house. There’s a hill that gently slopes down to the edge of the woods, a short walk into which you’ll reach a creek. But you can’t see that from the window; just the hill and the trees and the messy grass.

Aelwyn spends a lot of her time looking at that yard, when she’s home-where-it-does-not-feel-like-home. Plain and drab and sad. Her sister and her friends go to school and the adults go to work, but Aelwyn spends most days home alone. She can hardly stand to look at that empty yard for another second.

So, she decides she won’t.

She goes to the library one day, and spends hours browsing the shelves and reading, taking notes. She comes home in the evening when the library closes with a stack full of books, and stays up late reading them in bed while her sister trances in the bunk below. The next day she scours the garage and basement and storage of the manor for tools, anything she can scrounge together. She gathers them out back in preparation, leaning them against the wall outside. The next day, she goes out again, borrowing cash from Jawbone to get the items she’s missing. She thinks about stopping by the mall, too, for the right outfit, but Sandra Lynn catches on and gives her an old pair of boots and overalls for free.

The next day, she gets up early, and gets to work. 

The first few days are nothing but digging, ripping up grass and sprinkling fertilizer and turning the soil until there are new, neatly defined beds outlining the house and the yard, blank canvases.

She loses two days to a spring thunderstorm, one raining her out all day and one sunny but swamped with mud, setting her progress back at least a few more days. She feels like tearing her hair out, and throws a trowel across the yard in frustration. 

She comes back the next day, pulls the trowel out of the ground from where it’d stuck, and gets back to work. She spends hours one day lining the beds with rocks to keep them neat and pretty, and checking the levels of soil temperature, nutrient balance, everything. She makes a chart in her notebook, portioning out where everything will go. 

The next day she spends ten straight hours planting. Her only break, around noon, is when Jawbone comes out and brings her a sandwich and a lemonade and practically begs her to take a rest. She obliges, if only to quiet the distracting growl of her stomach. He has to come back out and drag her in when the sun goes down for dinner, despite her protests. When she washes up to eat, it takes her two minutes of scrubbing to remove the dirt stubbornly caked into her fingernails. 

If there’s anything good to come out of being an unemployed, out-of-school teenager slowly and painfully rebuilding herself from trauma, it’s that Aelwyn has a lot of free time. Free time she spends every day out under the sun in her new garden, planting seeds and sprouts and monitoring their progress, new greens popping up row by row. She covers the beds with mulch and straw to protect their roots, just like the books say to do. She waters them every morning, and curses when the rain comes and renders her work redundant. Her delicate elven skin starts to burn in the sunlight, even after she takes to wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but after so long it just starts to tan instead. Now when she washes in the evening she sees someone her parents would have hated – face sweaty and flushed, hands caked in dirt and callouses from work – and it feels good, in a strange way. There is a satisfaction in going to bed each night, climbing up onto the top bunk and collapsing in the pillows with the deep-set, satisfied exhaustion of hard work in her bones. 

Her garden starts out well enough, neatly arranged and manicured and ready to go. Then days pass, and weeks, and there is not much more to show. Nor is there enough new work to sustain her breakneck pace. Aelwyn stares out the window of the wizards’ tower and grows restless and frustrated again. She’s doing everything right. She’s double checked every book in the library about it. Why aren’t they growing? Why isn’t it _perfect?_

The manor’s inhabitants have long since figured out Aelwyn’s project, and her dedication to it, and they respect it. They don’t bother her when she’s working and they don’t offer to help, an interference. But visitors don’t always get that so intrinsically, and the Bad Kids have a lot of friends. There are the girls who live here, and then their male partymates, and occasionally other guests. The half-orc brings a satyr girlfriend along often, most times he visits.

“I like your garden,” she says. Aelwyn is sitting on the back porch, staring broodily over her stunted plants. She glances over her shoulder at the satyr unkindly, she who has broken the unspoken rule against disturbing her in her yard.

Aelwyn grunts and turns back, scowling. “I don’t.”

“O-oh,” Zelda says nervously. “I’m sorry, that was stupid. It’s, um, it’s just…fine?” she stammers to correct herself.

Aelwyn huffs. “They won’t grow properly. I’ve done _everything_ right.” She gestures in frustration at the neat rows of plants, manicured but underwhelming. 

“Some people, uh, some people just don’t have a green thumb,” Zelda says. “I mean, like, satyrs are supposed to be, like, really in touch with nature and stuff, right? But I can’t even keep a fern alive in my room, it’s like, crazy,” she continues. Aelwyn grunts again. “Have you tried talking to a druid?” Zelda continues. “They’re supposed to, like, know a lot about plants, right?”

“I don’t know any druids,” Aelwyn says bluntly. She’s talked to Sandra Lynn; a ranger is as close as she can get, but Sandra Lynn doesn’t know any more about gardening than Aelwyn does.

“I could ask Danielle for you?” Zelda offers. Aelwyn turns again and looks at her, confused. “Danielle Barkstock. She’s, uh, my party’s druid.”

“Danielle Barkstock,” Aelwyn repeats, placing the name. “She was one of those girls in the crystals.”

“Um,” Zelda says. “Yeah. Um. We all were. Uh…we formed an adventuring party together after…that.”

Aelwyn laughs once, no humor to it. “I’m sure she would _love_ to help me out with my pathetic little shithole here.”

“I could ask her for you,” Zelda repeats, sounding intensely nervous again. “I don’t have to tell her it’s for you.” Aelwyn looks her over again. “Sorry, it’s a crazy, stupid idea, I’m just…ignore me, haha, it’s stupid–”

“Would you?” Aelwyn cuts her off, sounding uncharacteristically soft. Zelda blinks, then nods.

A few days later, all the Bad Kids and all the Maidens are over at the manor for a party. Aelwyn pointedly stays out of the way, spending the afternoon in her garden. She hears the back porch door slide open and looks back to see who’s there. Zelda, and a half-elven girl with flowers braided into her hair. Actually, there’s a third with them: a small silver fox. 

“You must be Aelwyn,” the half-elf says.

“You must be Danielle,” Aelwyn returns coolly. Danielle descends the porch steps and wanders through the garden, observing Aelwyn’s work silently. Aelwyn waits, kneeling in the dirt, for any kind of feedback. “You’re a druid, then?” Aelwyn says, breaking the awkward silence. Danielle nods. Her fox wanders between the plants, sniffing them as it goes. “You know what’s wrong here, then? Why they won’t grow?”

“I know more about animals than plants,” Danielle responds neutrally. Aelwyn shuts up and looks down. “But I think I have an idea here,” she continues, finally looking at Aelwyn. She turns around and meets her gaze, hopeful if restrained. “It’s too _perfect._ You have to step back and let them grow on their own for a bit.”

Aelwyn’s brow furrows, confused. “I’m doing everything the gardening books say to do.”

“Then stop reading books,” Danielle says simply. “Plants are living things. They’ll tell you what they need if you let them grow and listen.” With that, she walks back to the house, her familiar following at her heel. 

Aelwyn blinks, dumbfounded and confused, and offers a feeble “thanks” as she goes. Danielle holds up a hand but doesn’t look back.

It feels strange, and foreign, and _wrong_ to sit back, but Aelwyn forces herself to heed the druid’s advice. She returns the gardening manuals to the library. She spends time in her garden still, but without tools in her hands. She lays in the grass and looks at the sky. She drinks tea and reads under the shade of the tree. She keeps the grass in the graveyard plot trimmed.

It does take a few days for her to notice, but her plants _do_ start to grow again. They creep beyond the boundaries she’d so carefully delineated for them, and she fights the urge to trim them back. She watches and listens to them closely, not with the eye or ear of a drill sergeant but of a parent, a real one, a loving one, one like Sandra Lynn who offered her overalls and one like Jawbone who brings her lunch and lemonade and asks her to rest. She finds what the plants ask for, and she gives it to them; plucks insect pests from their stems, prunes diseased leaves, ties them to stakes so they can grow tall, waters them when they’re wilting. 

By summer, it is no longer just green. Aelwyn wakes up one morning and looks out the window in the wizards’ tower, and for the first time, she sees _pink._ The next day, yellows. Soon, there is a rainbow of flowers blooming all over the yard, of a variety and vitality Aelwyn has never seen before. Her old home had a garden, sure, but it was too manicured, too neat, too formal, too artificial, and never was she allowed to tamper with it; that’s what hired landscapers were for. Mordred Manor has no hired hands; Aelwyn has her own.

Jawbone and Sandra Lynn meet her in her garden one day. It’s sunny and hot out, and Aelwyn is watching the bees and butterflies flit from plant to plant, drinking their fill of sweet nectar. They say how beautiful it is, and Aelwyn agrees. They tell her how proud they are of her work, and she agrees. They say they’re proud of how much she’s grown. (At first she thinks they mean the plants, but she realizes after what they really mean.) And they thank her for livening up the manor, and bringing some color out to the yard.

When they go inside, Aelwyn gets up, and grabs her shears. She finds the best blossoms from the best plants and carefully snips them off, tying their stems together in a bouquet with ribbon. And she sends them to Danielle, with an apology and a thank you.

**Author's Note:**

> rebloggable [here,](https://supercantaloupe.tumblr.com/post/644314030931132416/dimension20alphabet-prompt-fill-6-flowers) prompt list [here.](https://dimension20alphabet.tumblr.com/post/643573819181776896/prompt-masterlist)
> 
> thank you for reading!


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